Co-shaping the Future in Quadruple Helix Innovation Systems: Uncovering Public Preferences toward Participatory Research and Innovation
Summer 2019
The Quadruple Helix Model of innovation recognizes four major actors in the innovation system: science, policy, industry, and society. In keeping with this model, more and more governments are prioritizing...
Harmony in Design: A Synthesis of Literature from Classical Philosophy, the Sciences, Economics, and Design
Spring 2022
Classical theories of harmony have been used to explain phenomena like beauty, happiness, health, virtue, pleasure, peace, and even ecological sustainability. With the intent of making these theories...
Systems Thinking and Design Thinking: The Search for Principles in the World We Are Making
Summer 2019
While the concept of system has been part of design theory and practice from the beginning of the discipline, there is renewed interest today in the relationship of systems thinking and design. After...
Decolonizing Public Healthcare Systems: Designing with Indigenous Peoples
Winter 2022
Indigenous peoples around the world are being failed by current public health systems. This is directly linked to the ongoing issue of colonialism. We need to decolonize health systems if we want to...
Changing Design Education for the 21st Century
Spring 2020
Designers are entrusted with increasingly complex and impactful challenges. However, the current system of design education does not always prepare students for these challenges. When we examine what...
Wicked Problems: Flexible Characterizations and Visual Representations
Spring 2025
The term “wicked problem” is used to describe a wide range of challenges that defy definition or resolution. These descriptions often reference Rittel and Webber’s 1973 publication, repeatedly listing...
Systemic Design Principles in Social Innovation: A Study of Expert Practices and Design Rationales
Autumn 2020
In recent decades, design has expanded from a practice aimed at designing things to one that helps to address complex societal challenges. In this context, a field of practice called systemic design...
Posthumanism and Design
Spring 2017
Since at least the mid-1980s, design has been dominated by a human-centered and user-centered paradigm. Currently, the implications of technological and environmental transformations are challenging...
Pluriversal Futures for Design Education
Summer 2023
The Future of Design Education working group on pluriversal design—with members from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, South and Southeastern Asia, North America, Oceania, and Europe—developed recommendations...
Foresight and Design: New Support for Strategic Decision Making
Autumn 2020
Decision makers who plan, decide, and act to influence change need to rely on a new, emerging approach to the future in the increasingly turbulent environments they face today. After reviewing the evidence...
The Future End of Design Work: A Critical Overview of Managerialism, Generative AI, and the Nature of Knowledge Work, and Why Craft Remains Relevant
Winter 2024
This article examines the transformation of design work under the influence of managerialism and the rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Drawing on John Maynard Keynes’s projections...
Data-Driven Innovation for Trustworthy AI
Autumn 2025
Global concerns over the trustworthiness of rapidly proliferating artificial intelligence (AI)-centric artifacts have led to generic institutional recommendations for trustworthy AI, which have yet...
Speculative Design as Thought Experiment
Autumn 2021
Speculative design is a subsidiary field of critical design practice. It generally involves developing scenarios based on a central object, often a prototype. Because it is concerned with alternative...
Dealing with Wicked Problems: Normative Paradigms for Design Thinking
Winter 2024
Wicked problems, such as climate change, poverty, and antibiotic resistance, are ethical problems, as moral plurality about the social good is one of their constituting factors. Although wicked problems...
Revisiting “Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science?”—The Question of Quality in Communication Design
Summer 2022
In 1988, I published an article on the criteria for quality in communication design. This article revisits the issues I raised: performance, rather than style, should be the determining factor in assessing...
In Conversation with Ezio Manzini: Design for Social Innovation—What We’ve Learned So Far
Spring 2023
Gjoko Muratovski and Ezio Manzini discuss and reflect on the impact of the idea of design for social innovation towards sustainability. In this wide-reaching conversation they cover topics that range...
Understanding Medical Technology Innovation in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Factors, Impact, and a Model Proposal
Summer 2024
The existing conceptual model for medical technology innovation management is a poor fit for low- and middle-income countries as it overlooks their unique challenges and constraints. The purpose of...
Design beyond Design
Summer 2019
As organizations struggle to respond to a world in which problems are becoming more open, complex and increasingly networked, many have turned to design thinking as a way to obtain solutions and achieve...
Design, the Language of Innovation: A Review of the Design Studies Literature
Autumn 2018
There is a vast body of research exploring the myriad ways design can contribute to business success. For example, businesses seeing to generate new products, services, processes, models, and strategies...
Rethinking Design Education
Summer 2023
This opening article for the special issue on the Future of Design Education traces paradigmatic shifts in design, from the twentieth-century mass production of artifacts to the twenty-first-century...
Critique of Design Thinking in Organizations: Strongholds and Shortcomings of the Making Paradigm
Winter 2021
Despite claims that design has moved beyond making artifacts and products, prevailing theories of design thinking in organizations remain entrenched in the making or technē paradigm. Ironically, this...
Sustainability in the Future of Design Education
Summer 2023
The Future of Design Education working group on sustainability developed recommendations for integrating sustainability into higher education design curricula. The recommendations provide a foundation...
DesignX: Complex Sociotechnical Systems
Winter 2015
This paper is a follow up to DesignX, a position paper written in 2014, which introduced the design challenges of complex sociotechnical systems such as healthcare, transportation, governmental policy,...
Interaction, Integration, Interconnectivity, and Iteration: A New Model for Designing Infrastructure Change
Winter 2022
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the obsolescence of the infrastructures we rely on in our everyday lives. Since the Industrial Revolution, design and public health have taken parallel...